The present invention is related to computer software and more specifically to remote file management computer software.
Information in files that may reside on a mainframe computer, such as a S/390 computer system commercially available from IBM corporation of White Plains, N.Y., may be needed on a personal computer, such as a Pentium III compatible personal computer commercially available from Dell Computer Corporation of Round Rock, Tex. running the Windows NT operating system commercially available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond Wash. The information in the files on the mainframe may be stored in a format different from that required on the personal computer.
It may be possible to prompt the user to specify the proper file conversions that must be performed when transferring to a personal computer some or all of a file stored on a mainframe, but requiring the user to supply such specifications is not always desirable for several reasons. First, the user may not know the proper specifications required for the file conversion. Second, the user may incorrectly specify the conversion, allowing the data transferred to the user to appear corrupted, causing user frustration.
What is needed is a method and apparatus that can automatically specify file conversions.
A method and apparatus allows the designation of a set of one or more files on a mainframe as belonging to a folder in a client computer system, and assigns one or more file conversion properties to each folder. When a portion of a file is requested, for example by using a folder name and the filename of the file, the portion of the file is converted according to the conversion properties for that folder and transferred from the mainframe to the client computer system. The portion of the file may be all of the file or less than all of the file. The file may be converted by removing padding characters, which may be performed before the file is transferred to the mainframe to enhance efficiency. The file may be converted by converting some or all of the characters in the file from EBCDIC to ASCII. If desired, conversion may only be performed on single byte characters of a multibyte character set. The folder may be specified using the folder name and filename, but may be specified in other ways, for example by using the filename and a drive designator that corresponds to the mainframe computer system. Because the designation of a file as being in a particular folder and the conversion properties of each folder can be local to a client computer system, each client computer system in a system of multiple client computer systems can arrange the same files on the mainframe computer system in a different manner and convert the files differently from other client computer systems. A single file may be designated as belonging to several. folders, and converted differently depending on the folder used to identify the portion of the file for retrieval. If the file is altered at the client computer system, it may be returned to the mainframe computer system for storage. When the portion of the file is returned to the mainframe computer system, the file is converted back to its original format. The conversion back may be accomplished using the folder properties of the folder used to retrieve the file from the mainframe or a different conversion may be performed using folder properties of a different folder.